Vue-logy: the end of the printed alt weekly in Edmonton

People keep ditching Facebook like wet rats, fairly pointing out it’s an all-access pass to pain — but to me it was really the algorithms that broke that machine. It was perfectly functional about five, six years ago. You’d see what your friends posted, be able to track events happening in real time, and there was a meaningful sense of person-to-person communication going on — with a lot of amazing randomness thrown in.

It’s preposterous we couldn’t technologically recapture this ideal state, but the globe-coating social media dominatrix has clearly demonstrated its priorities, including all but blocking traditional media outlets from telling you what’s happening in the arts unless they a) pay Facebook lots of money they don’t have or b) happen to have an article shared a lot — which of course doesn’t easily happen if you don’t see said content in the first place due to that frustrating, pay-to-play catch-22.

But if you want to talk about some of the hurdles Vue Weekly faced on its way out, you could reasonably include this one, and suddenly we have one fewer voice for culture and non-payola politics out there on the streets with the alt weekly’s demise.

This, just in time for a fiercely important provincial election, about which columnist Ricardo Acuña would surely have had a lot of smart and interesting things to say — never mind additions to the general cultural conversation, including Chelsea Novak’s visual art adventures, Scott Lingley’s crisp and witty restaurant reviews, Stephan Boissoneault’s tireless music coverage and weekly syndicated atom bombs by Gwynn Dyer and Dan Savage, who never held back on advice about sticking things into your body.

This is all preamble to the fact that, as of its final issue Thursday, Edmonton no longer has an in-print “alt” arts and opinion paper for the first time since at least the mid-‘80s.

Vue’s owners have given up the ghost, talking about diminishing pickup and advertising revenues with a sort of “it’s not you, it’s me” tone.

All of which may be fair and true, but it sucks anyway.

In and around Vue’s last issue will hover all sorts of personal histories, remembrance of milestones and thank-yous for engagement, which I have to barge into as someone who’s had a cartoon running on its second-last page for the last seven years (and in various publications including SEE and the Gateway continuously since 1989).

As of next week, that perfect attendance print-cartooning run ends.

Vue Weekly and SEE Magazine merged in 2011.Bruce Edwards /
Postmedia

I was on the wrong side of the long-running SEE vs. Vue weekly world war, but even Vue’s sage Ron Garth was kind to me when I’d crash their parties with Darren Zenko, who blessed and cursed any editor he wrote for with his tremendously acute writings and how late he’d always file them.

Zenko left us in 2012, and for all his love and charm, nothing made him madder than the missteps of local media — I can still hear his fist punching various front covers. But for all my desire to honour that fire, the loss of Vue doesn’t make me at all angry, just sad.

That may seem funny coming from a competitor, arts coverage-wise. But as a conspirator to make Edmonton a more interesting city by encouraging the arts as much as humanly possible, I never thought of Vue as an enemy, even when I worked for their bitter rival SEE.

Because as far as the arts go, the more coverage — the more media — the better.

What especially gets me about the loss of the space-occupying arts weekly is a thing I still very much covet about any print media: that page-turning sense of magazine browsing, which inevitably leads to encountering information you’re not specifically looking for from which you might accidentally learn something. It’s the difference between a good bookstore or library and amazon.com.

It’s true that without Vue there will still be gig posters on Jasper and Whyte, and a number of online arts and entertainment publications thankfully continue to serve as Virgils in the dark. And besides our own Journal writers, Three to See in these pages is doing its damnedest to transmit the enviable volume of events going on every single day in town.

But losing Vue’s alt-weekly street-box model and comforting presence in coffee shops, bars and transit centres removes a sort of Grand Central Station of connections to local and incoming music, theatre, art, literature, film and — frankly — ways of being.

It adds to a further cultural shattering and tribal isolationism, when what we really need is the opposite: more cross-pollination, less fear of the supposedly unknowable.

Vue going down is not the end of culture in Edmonton, but it sure doesn’t help. It serves as a reminder of the tenuous position traditional media holds against hypnotic social media, vanishing from the physical world into direct competition with such lures as properly lit selfies, swipe-right hookups and (I get it) our civilization-wide total addiction to approval statistics via “likes.”

Within this battleground for time and attention I can only ask that you try and keep those remaining links to local culture lit and well oiled, including by making social media work for you and by extension us — even if it’s just with a well-deployed share now and then — instead of the other way around.

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